Drag Week 2017 Winner Dave Schroeder’s 1966 Corvette

Drag Week 2017 saw its first nitrous win in Unlimited since 2006.

“We had super-low expectations coming in. Everyone was pretty down.”

So spoke Dave Schroeder, driver of the Schroeder-Ens 1966 Corvette, and our 2017 Drag Week overall and Unlimited class winner. The Corvette is a regular in Unlimited and has always attracted attention for its Grand-Sport–inspired paint job and massive, nitrous-huffing, 872ci big-block. Cousins, Schroeder, and his co-driver, John Ens, are soft-spoken Canadians—modest and quick to look on the bright side. Coming into Drag Week 2017, we found morale on the Schroeder-Ens team at an all-time low. It started with a crash on Day 1 of Drag Week 2016 and only got worse with the loss of their good friend and brilliant nitrous tuner, Monte Smith, who passed away in March 2017. Yes, they’d repaired all the crash damage to the Vette and even managed to drop some weight and fix some long-standing cooling and suspension issues while it was torn apart, but they hadn’t had any luck in testing without Monte, and really, they’d never had any luck at all in the five years previously running the Vette. In half a decade of running, the Corvette had only finished Drag Week one time (2014)—after a partial engine rebuild done under a portable canopy in a thunderstorm. No sensible gambler would have put money down on the Corvette for the win, but nothing about Drag Week is sensible.

Schroeder says it was all luck. “Can’t count the number of times we couldn’t get 10 feet down the track, and then on the Sunday test day it ran consistently, twice in a row, and then it ran the 6.57 on Monday. That’s when we started getting excited.”

Your hub for horsepower
Get first access to hit shows like Roadkill and Dirt Every Day

Getting down track may have been lucky, but as any Drag Weeker will tell you, it’s the street driving that eats valvetrains and pokes holes—literal and figurative—in your combination. The Vette crew had experienced their share of damage, but that helped them develop a strip-to-street transformation, plus some build tricks to help keep everything cool and connected. After a good run, they unplug the nitrous and pack away the bottles. Then the valve covers come off and the Jesel 1.90/1.85 rocker arms are removed and replaced with 1.60:1/1.55:1 ratio rockers from WW Engineering for a slightly gentler street setup—top-end items being one of the common failure points for all Drag Week cars. Along with reducing spring pressure, the Vette keeps the intake springs cool with a piped-in oil bath, thanks to custom tubing and squirters in the valve covers by Ken Murray from Ken’s Kustom Autos in Winnipeg. Once the engine is buttoned up, the guys put on the air filters, swap out the 8-gallon race fuel cell and roll in a 16-gallon street tank. “Last year, we saw Jeff Lutz’s tank mounted on the wheelie bar, and we thought that was so clever, how he could just roll that heavy thing around, so we put wheels on ours.” They change all four tires, going treaded in the rear and a slightly taller skinny in the front. A few clicks on the laptop and the Vette is tuned for street use.

Schroeder told us he almost feels guilty for how easy they had it on the street this year. “Normally, the Unlimited winner has to work really hard for it. In 2016, I don’t think Lutz had any sleep at all, and here we are, in bed by midnight or before almost every night.” That isn’t to say the drives were completely problem-free. The hoses on their fuel tank did not like the Midwestern pump gas, and they had to drop the cell three times to change three different leaky lines. “If we had done all three at once, that would have been the smart thing.”

It’s a pretty amazing thing to start the week with no confidence in even finishing and end it in the very top spot, with an overall average of 6.813 at 207 mph. “I wish Monte could have seen it,” Schroeder says. “But I felt like he was there, pushing us down the track.”

Dave Schroeder bought the 1966 Corvette in 2009 and bought it with no real plan for racing it. At the time, he and cousin John Ens were running a 1955 Chevy in Drag Week. In 2012, the rules put the ’55 out of competition, so the guys brought out the Vette, with a newly done Vito Antonicelli chassis and 598ci engine. For the next five years, they would struggle with melted pistons, dropped valves, and an immovable wall. Each year, the car would come back with more cubic inches and renewed faith. In 2017, their hard work paid off with a win in the Unlimited class, the overall win, and a nitrous-car record—an average of 6.813 at 207 mph—after 1,000 miles of street driving and five days of quarter-mile passes.That is 872 ci of Reher Morrison–built Pro Mod engine, detuned slightly for street survivability. Visner Engineering Development (VED) built the intake manifold and two Nick Williams drive-by-wire 102mm throttle-bodies and Fuel Injector Clinic 220-lb/hr injectors match the gas to the laughing gas. The four-stage NOS system was designed by Month Smith, and as of this writing, the guys have yet to use the fourth stage.Cooling is crucial, and along with a top-end oil bath, the Vette keeps its cool thanks to a Laminova water-to-oil cooler and twin Delta PAG 16-inch brushless fans and radiator. Schroeder says the fans, with their low draw and superior airflow, are one of the key changes made to the Corvette for 2017.Schroeder says one thing they learned over the years was to bring two of everything that could break, so this year they hauled two complete heads, two pistons with rods, one set of lifters, extra batteries and chargers, alternators and belts, a starter, an extra fan, a street fuel pump, and a bunch of sensors and electronics: “Of course, since we brought it all, we didn’t need any of it.”In a world dominated by turbo cars, Schroeder and Ens were on their own, with nobody to ask for advice, and plenty of doubters. “Everyone was always telling us to forget the nitrous—go turbo, it won’t survive, it won’t go fast. Well, we didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing, and I think we proved that this junk will last and go fast.”Schroeder and Ens are cousins and grew up admiring an uncle who was a Harley-Davidson dealer and a hot rodder. “We were young kids in the ’70s, and we dreamed of cars,” Schroeder says. Now they can inspire the next generation with their own collections.